With a sense of relief that things were finally under control, Alto looked at the towering wall without a hint of surprise. He hadn't run into this dead end by mistake; he had planned all along to find a wall suitable for climbing. This spot was perfect. The small landscaping trees were strong enough to hold a man's weight, and he could climb one to use a branch leaning against the wall to jump over. Leaving the hospital this way was much safer than trying the main or side gates, as it allowed him to avoid being cornered by zombies. He had already observed that these zombies lacked the coordination for something as difficult as climbing a tree. By leaving the hospital here, he could easily shake the pack following him.
In an instant, Alto reached the tree. With a look back at the dark mass of zombies behind him, he estimated there were at least eighty to a hundred of them. If that crowd caught him, he would be chewed into scraps. He wouldn't even get the chance to turn into a zombie, for no one had ever seen a pile of minced meat come back to life.
He began to climb. Back in the countryside, he had been beaten plenty of times for climbing trees, but that never stopped him from going up to pick fruit or raid hornet nests. It was a good thing he hadn't let those beatings discourage him, or he never would have mastered such a supernatural talent for climbing. With just a few quick movements, Alto climbed onto the branches.
Below, zombies had already begun to swarm. Having lost the ability to climb, they could only circle the base and howl. Amidst the jostling, the tree began to shake violently. The leaves rustled loudly, which only spurred the zombies to gather and shove against the trunk with even more force. With a cold sweat breaking out across his skin, Alto nearly lost his grip. Falling into the crowd below would mean a death without a body left to bury. He quickly scrambled toward the branch touching the wall and transferred himself onto the ledge.
With a sigh of relief, Alto felt safe once he stepped onto the solid masonry. At least he wouldn't have to play hide-and-seek with that horde in the open anymore. That feeling of running until exhaustion kept his nerves as tight as a bowstring, a sensation like being executed by a thousand cuts. The zombies were still frantically attacking the tree below, seemingly unaware that their prey had already jumped to the wall. Alto didn't rush. With a few minutes spent catching his breath, he began to survey the situation outside.
He pushed aside the thick leaves and looked down. Below was a quiet alley. One side was the hospital wall, while the other was lined with small breakfast diners and dilapidated hotels. These diners all had their doors wide open, and tables and chairs were scattered everywhere in a mess. Dried bloodstains were visible on the floors and walls, and even the pavement outside was streaked with red. It was hard to imagine what had happened in this alley, but it must have been horrific.
Alto watched for a moment and found that there wasn't a single zombie in the alley. With a careful movement, he crouched down and leaped from the wall to land in the lane. He could still hear the various noises the zombies were making on the other side of the wall, but he shook his head and left those sounds behind. The alley smelled of the same rot found in the hospital, though the scent wasn't quite as thick. With a frown, he walked toward the restaurants to find food and water.
Most of these diners usually had glass bottled juice or sodas on the tables, and those were his primary targets. However, his plan failed. Not a single table or chair in the small restaurant was upright, as everything had been overturned during the chaos. The glass bottles had shattered on the floor, and their contents had long since leaked away. The spilled drinks had dried into sugary patches that made his shoes stick and click with every step. He could see many ants and small flies trapped in the sugar, forming black spots on the floor. These mingled with the dark stains of dried blood to create a nauseating scene.
He ignored the more disgusting sights and searched the mess for anything useful. Because so much time had passed and the shops were so cramped, there was very little left after the initial looting and frantic escapes. He wanted to find a knife to use as a backup weapon, but several shops turned up nothing. Even a small restaurant should have had a kitchen knife, so the conclusion was obvious: someone had already taken them. Perhaps someone had charged out with a knife when the outbreak started, or perhaps someone had already scavenged this area. There were no bodies or zombies here, otherwise Alto might have been able to loot something from them.
He walked through several restaurants, all of them filled with overturned furniture, blood, and dried drink stains. Just as he was about to leave the alley, he found a single bottle of bottled juice that had survived in the third-to-last shop. Normally, Alto wouldn't even look at such a drink, as it was nothing more than food coloring, artificial flavors, and sugar. At this moment, however, it was like water from a divine spring. He slammed the cap against the edge of an overturned table to pop it off and chugged the entire five hundred milliliters in one go. He wasn't fully satisfied, but he felt better than before. The high sugar content provided a much-needed boost of energy.
With a small stool he had pulled over, Alto sat down to rest before moving on. He felt a dull ache in the back of his head again, and a wave of dizziness washed over him. He had likely overexerted himself while running for his life. This level of activity would have been nothing to him before, but for his unhealed body, it was a heavy burden. After sitting for ten minutes, he felt a bit lighter. He planned to leave the alley and check the main street. A single bottle of juice wasn't enough. The weather was too hot, and he needed more water and food to fill his stomach. It was nearly noon, the hottest part of the day, and he needed to find supplies and a comfortable place to hide from the heat.
With that thought, Alto stood up and walked toward the exit of the alley. He was unfamiliar with this neighborhood and had no idea what the main street looked like. Having only gone to school in Zenith city for a year, the only area he knew well was the district where his school was located. Zenith was a massive metropolis with five districts. He only ever came to this specific district to play ball with students from the university, so he was essentially lost.
With a plan forming in his mind, Alto decided to find food and water first, then look for a detailed map. He walked out of the alley and onto the wide main street, where the scene was even more unbearable. Under the blinding white sunlight, crashed vehicles littered the road, almost completely blocking it. The collisions had likely caused fires, as there were scorch marks and soot everywhere. Piles of charred corpses lay on the ground, emitting a stench of burnt flesh and rot.
With a tug on the cloth covering his nose and mouth, Alto tightened his mask, even though he knew it did little good. He could still smell the air and breathe in bacteria through the gaps. It was merely a psychological comfort. Without the cloth, he felt as if his mouth were directly touching the corpses. Ever since his middle school teacher explained that molecules are always in motion, Alto understood that smelling something meant inhaling its particles.
With his eyes turned elsewhere, Alto stopped looking at the corpses. Piles of trash lined the streets, and shards of glass reflected the harsh light. These were the scars left by mindless looting and rioting. He could imagine how unstable the city had been during the collapse. Some people had likely celebrated the end of the world by doing things they never dared to do before, while the kind and the cowardly hid behind their curtains and watched the city crumble.
Images of swarming zombies, panicked crowds, and violent rioters flickered through his mind. He could almost hear the screams, the crying, the roars, and the howls of the zombies. He imagined the sound of mad laughter and the voices of those trying to calmly direct the escape. Alto sighed. His senses were sharp, and he often found himself automatically reconstructing scenes based on his surroundings. While not always perfectly accurate, they were usually close to the truth. He sometimes hated this trait because it forced him to see dark and terrifying things. He had heard it was a natural talent for profiling, but he never looked into it. Many people had similar sensitivities, like writers catching inspiration or detectives looking for clues.
Alto had no intention of developing this ability; he just wanted to live a simple life. His dream was to graduate, go back to his hometown, and become a physical education teacher. It was a stable, simple life that would put his parents' minds at ease. That was why he had chosen to major in physical education. Now, looking at the destruction around him, that dream seemed impossible to achieve.
The surroundings were caught in an eerie silence. Alto had never known the city to be this quiet. Usually, the streets were filled with the roar of traffic and the noise of crowds. This silence felt like the calm before a storm, making his heart race. The quieter it was, the more suspicious the street became. Either every living thing on this street was dead, or something was hiding in the shadows, intentionally staying quiet.
He needed to leave this street quickly. With quick and light steps, Alto picked up his pace, though he tried to keep his feet from making too much noise on the sandy pavement. In such a quiet environment, anyone making noise became a target. This street was lined with high-end hotels, a sharp contrast to the alley he had just left. People coming to a major facility like Zenith's hospital were usually split into two groups: the wealthy, who stayed in these luxury hotels, and the poor, who spent everything on medical bills and were forced into the filthy alleys. Alto was an exception; he had likely been brought to the hospital by ambulance after collapsing on the court.
Looking at the luxury hotels, Alto knew he couldn't go inside. The doors were wide open, revealing spacious lobbies. If there were zombies inside, there would be a massive number of them. Without power, the lobbies were nothing but dark voids. He wouldn't risk his life for food there. While those hotels had food, most of it was likely fresh or pre-packaged items that had long since rotted without refrigeration. Convenience stores and small supermarkets were better bets for finding preserved food and water. However, he could only go to small ones. Large spaces with plenty of goods meant they were crowded during normal times, and more people meant more zombies.
He kept his eyes on the small shops, but he didn't see any on this street. The silence was starting to make him panic. It was noon now, and the sun beat down on his head. With sweat soaking his hospital gown and sticking to his skin, his vision began to blur. He was still too weak. The debris on the street made his progress difficult. He struggled through a cluster of burnt-out car frames and carefully picked his way through charred remains.
Up ahead, he spotted a protruding awning that looked like it belonged to a cafe. Several high-backed chairs lay overturned beneath it. He didn't dare go inside a shop to hide from the sun, but resting under an outdoor awning seemed safe enough. Alto moved under the shade and set a chair upright to sit down. Though the air was still muggy, his skin was no longer stinging from the direct heat of the sun.
Before he could even catch his breath, he caught something moving in the corner of his eye behind the cafe's glass window. The movement was slight, but it sent a shiver down his spine. He slowly turned his head and saw that the cafe was packed with zombies, at least twenty or thirty of them. They stood there vacantly, moving their bodies so slowly that it was hard to notice unless one was paying close attention. With his head spinning, Alto realized how lucky he was that they hadn't noticed him.
He stood up quietly, preparing to leave. Driven by a sudden impulse, he looked closely at all the shops along the street. Through the glass, he could clearly see that almost every single shop was packed with zombies.
…
It was a good thing he had been moving quietly and cautiously. The zombies were all standing still, their bodies swaying slightly. They didn't seem to like the intense sunlight and were hiding indoors to hibernate. Alto suddenly remembered a detail he had overlooked. When he woke up in the hospital yesterday, he hadn't seen anything from his window, but the zombies had started appearing as evening approached. Even this morning, the zombies that chased him in the hospital had been startled out of the shade of the trees.
The eerie silence of the main street wasn't because there were no creatures around; it was because there were too many zombies, all of them huddled inside the shops. If anyone made a sound, the zombies from both sides of the street would come pouring out and overwhelm the area. At that point, not even a rat would be able to escape. Perhaps someone was hiding behind a curtain in one of the hotels right now, watching him cross the street but unable to shout a warning for fear of the lurking monsters.
Alto hadn't noticed them before for two reasons. First, the glare on the glass made it hard to see inside if he wasn't specifically looking for a convenience store. Second, the intense sunlight had temporarily blinded him. Moving from bright light to shade causes a brief loss of vision before the eyes adjust. He had only noticed the zombies in the cafe because he had been sitting in the shade of the awning for a few minutes.
When he stepped back out into the light, he had to squint. He adjusted to the glare and continued walking through the heat. This time, he was even more careful, terrified of waking a single zombie. One mistake would cause a chain reaction that he couldn't escape. As the sun beat down, he gradually relaxed again, perhaps proving the saying "out of sight, out of mind."
Ten minutes later, he reached a crossroads. The city was a ruin. The street ahead looked the same as the one he had just traveled, but the streets branching off to the left and right were different. These streets were in the shade, and he could see small groups of zombies wandering aimlessly, their throats emitting low growls. Alto was grateful for the pileup of cars at the intersection. They completely blocked the road, preventing the wandering zombies from moving into his path.
He kept himself silent as he climbed over several mangled cars. A sharp snap echoed as his foot hit a loose car part. With his balance failing, Alto pitched forward and barely caught himself with his hands. His face was inches away from a jagged piece of scrap metal. Suddenly, a pair of cloudy eyes appeared from beneath the metal pile. It was a zombie trapped between the cars, and it opened its mouth to let out a signature howl.
With sweat on his brow, Alto reached behind his waist and pulled out the iron rod he had fashioned from an IV stand. He drove it straight into the zombie's cloudy eye. Fluid sprayed out like a popped water balloon, and the creature went silent instantly. Though the noise was small, it attracted another wandering zombie nearby. Alto pulled the iron rod out and thrust it forward in one fluid motion, taking down the second one. He caught the body with his hand to ensure it hit the ground without a sound.
He hadn't alerted any other zombies. Since he had killed before, he found himself much calmer this time. Stabbing the rod felt no different than piercing a watermelon. With slow steps, Alto emerged from the pile of cars and continued down the street. Inside the shops on either side, hordes of zombies hibernated, waiting for the night or a loud noise to wake them.
With the sun still overhead, he was reaching his limit. Dehydration, hunger, and physical weakness were taking their toll. He felt like he could collapse at any moment. He wanted to use the iron rod as a cane, but he feared the clinking sound it would make against the pavement. If he were chased by a pack now, he wouldn't make it a hundred meters. He might even suffer a heart attack and drop dead on the spot.
In movies and novels, protagonists were always strong and could run for miles even when injured. Why was it that he felt like he was going to die after just climbing a wall and walking two blocks? It seemed fiction couldn't be trusted. He passed a convenience store, but the door was gone and the shelves were overturned and empty. A few zombies were trapped inside, and even if there were leftovers, he didn't have the strength to fight them.
Alto pushed on for a while longer until he simply couldn't move anymore. His lips were cracked and bleeding. He used the cloth over his face to wipe the blood away, hoping the scent wouldn't attract any monsters. His breathing grew heavy and ragged, as if he had just finished a sprint. With black spots dancing before his eyes, he felt the telltale signs of an impending faint.